Western Digital My Cloud Home Review: Fix Your Full Dropbox

Recently I reviewed the new Huawei P40 Pro. Most people are getting caught up on the challenge people face with using a phone that doesn’t support Google Apps. I used it for weeks without much hassle. I’ve also managed up load Google onto it. Ultimately, for me, the P40 Pro is a fantastic phone and I wouldn’t let a lack of Google stand in my way of using it as my daily rider. It also opened up my eyes to how possible living outside a Google eco-system really was. Chrome became Firefox, Google Play Store made way for the Huawei AppGallery and Google Drive was replaced by Western Digital’s My Cloud Home.

What Is Western Digital My Cloud Home?

The My Cloud Home is a hard drive which you connect to your home network. This means that you can save all your files to it when you’re at home and then access them when you’re out and about. This is made nice and simple, neat and tidy, by the My Cloud Home platform and apps.

For example, if you have your wedding photos saved to your My Cloud Home system, you could be visiting someone else’s house and show them a slideshow. If that’s a thing people do.

Why Buy A Western Digital My Cloud Home?

There are countless uses for the My Cloud Home system and some massive benefits. I’ve been using one for a few months and here are some of my favourite reasons why you should buy a My Cloud Home.

Fix That Full Dropbox Error

How many people are in this boat? You were in college and signed up for 2GB of Dropbox storage. Mainly it was because your mate needed another 500MB and they got it by referring you. Now, you’ve somehow ended up with 15GB of “stuff” in Dropbox and get regular emails annoying you to pay for the service.

Don’t get me wrong, Dropbox is a good service, but this is an annoying situation and you should have to pay for constant storage of old files you might never look at again.

The My Cloud platform and storage allows for a quick connection to Dropbox. That means, you just log in and connect the two services before My Cloud transfers the lot onto your own storage. You can then shut down your Dropbox and Bob’s your uncle.

Buy Devices With Lower Storage

My mobile data is unlimited. My home wifi is fast. I don’t really need a device with 256GB of storage. I recently bought an iPad and for the first time I didn’t just go for huge memory capacity. Instead, I saved myself a small fortune and bought the 32GB model. My reason being most of my data is now stored on my own cloud server at home. Once I have the app installed on my iPad, everything gets cleaned up on a regular basis and 32GB turns our to be plenty.

At the end of the day, My Cloud Home offers me 8TB of storage. That’s huge. So huge that that actually cut the capacity in half and use 4TB for storage and the other 4TB to back up for the first lot. It would be silly to spend more money on device storage and not make the most of my personal cloud setup.

Reduced Dependency On Cloud Storage Providers

Cloud storage is a great bit of tech. However, it survives on a horrible principle. Once you’ve used their free tier and need more storage, you’re agreeing to pay a small fee for fairly sizeable storage. The reason they do this is that they know you’ll probably be happy to spend a couple of euro a month to just not think about that extra memory you needed.

Here’s how much you would pay for cloud storage with the usual suspects:

Beyond this, Google offers 10TB of cloud storage for €99.99 per month. That’s a lot of money for a lot of storage. But I don’t really understand why you’d pay a monthly fee when Western Digital’s My Cloud Home would pay for itself in just three months.

Privacy

Taking back ownership of your data is certainly an emerging trend lately. Our trust in big tech like Google and Apple has taken some hits in recent years for one reason or another. My setting up your own cloud server at home with something simple and user friendly like the My Cloud Home, you do get a sense of taking the power back. It feels warm and fuzzy. At least I hope that’s the cloud storage.

Turn It Into An Entertainment Center

If you digitised all your favourite movies, because I’m not sure how else you would acquire movie files, your My Cloud Home becomes an entertainment centre. Connected with Plex, the system means you can stream movies from your home server to your phone, anywhere in the world once you have an internet connection. Pretty neat.

Download Everything From Facebook And Cut Ties

One of the smartest things Western Digital included is social media download. Just log into Facebook or Instagram and you can download everything. All your images and videos. Why? So you can go about quitting Facebook for good. It really is the ultimate device to cut ties with big tech you’ve lost faith in.

Western Digital My Cloud Home: The Verdict

Don’t let terms like “cloud storage” or “personal cloud server” put you off adopting something like the Western Digital My Cloud Home. I found the setup of the whole system fairly easy but not without the odd hiccup.

If you read the manuals and check out a YouTube video or two you’ll be able to get the most out of this cloud server. Download MyCloud app to your devices and log into a few accounts and you’ll soon be getting the very most out of your new purchase. Remember, the value is even bigger if you have a device with a small memory or are already paying for cloud storage from a big provider.

Pricing for the Western Digital My Cloud Home starts at €160 for a 2TB model and come in a variety of memory sizes, right up to 20TB for €859.

Is WD My Cloud Worth It?

Home cloud storage is hardly sexy stuff. Spending this kind of money wasn’t really on the cards a few years ago. But now you might just be paying for Apple Cloud storage or similar. If you do the maths, you’ll see that something like this is better value in the long term and offers more privacy. That’s always worth it.